Cabinets Of Wonder: Films and a Performance by Charlotte Pryce

“Charlotte Pryce’s body of work offers the beautiful possibilities of film as miniature, wherein brief filmic glimpses offer depths of suggestion and inquiry." —Chris Kennedy and Vanessa O’Neill

World premieres

Jack H. Skirball Series

Charlotte Pryce’s exquisitely detailed and evocatively structured short films suggest an alert daydreaming in which the documented and the imagined are juxtaposed. Her films offer fleeting illuminations at the periphery of vision, calling into question the “mechanical eye” of the lens and the chemical composition of the celluloid. The films use 16mm “chrome” stocks—now-extinct reversal color—which are hand-processed and optically reprinted. “Like the items in a Cabinet of Wonder, my subjects are specimens of philosophical musing: rootless plants, mysterious insects and curious glasses,” says Pryce. The program includes Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature, Discoveries on the Forest Floor, The Parable of the Tulip Painter and the Fly, Curious Light, Looking Glass Insects,A Study in Natural Magic, and a live magic lantern show.

In person: Charlotte Pryce

Funded in part with generous support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.